Want to Fly For Much, Much Less? Bookmark These 5 Websites

Going on a trip is an exciting experience that people spend months looking forward to. A not-so-pleasurable experience is shelling out insane amounts of cash for plane tickets. There are plenty of sites that claim to offer cheaper tickets, but they can be hard to use and feel like a waste of time. These sites offer to save you money but either end up being as expensive as other sites or end up not having deals for the destinations you want to go to.

Let’s fix that. Below are 5 websites that, when you use them all together, will almost always guarantee you huge discounts on plane tickets.

Fly4Free

Fly4Free.com gives readers a heads-up whenever its team finds discounted flight deals for people flying out of the USA, Europe, Asia and Australia. The trick to making Fly4Free work for you is to keep a constant stream of deals on your radar. Consider following their Facebook feeds (there are four of them, for flights from the USA, from Europe, from Asia and from Australia) or their Twitter feed.

TravelPirates

TravelPirates.com is another site has daily announcements about flight deals all around the world (as well as deals on cruises, rental cars, hotels, and vacation packages). Like Fly4Free above, find a way to get TravelPirates’ stream of deals into your daily reading.

The Flight Deal

The third and final deals site, theflightdeal.com has a newsletter, Facebook page and Twitter feed where you can get daily updates on sales fares and error fares. With feeds set up for all three of these sites, you can keep an eye on opportunities for drastically reduced plane tickets. This is a good option if you don’t have firm travel plans or dates set, but you have the flexibility to jump on a good deal when it pops up.

ITA Matrix

ITA Software’sMatrix Airfare Searchis the most robust fare finder available to consumers. It’s so powerful and has so many features that you’ll probably need a tutorial to uncover all the tricks available to you. Fortunately, UpgradedPoints.comhas an excellent tutorial on all the advanced functions you can access in the ITA Matrix. This should be your first stop once you have a destination in mind and a range of dates for travel. If one of the fare alert sites failed to uncover a deal that’s right for you, ITA Matrix will help you figure out a baseline price for travel.

The next step is to hire a travel hacker to beat that baseline price.

Flight Fox

FlightFox has a pool of freelance travel hackers who will take your itinerary and guarantee they can beat the lowest price you’ve found (they charge $17 per person for the service). Just give them your destination, when you’d like to go and a few other details, and FlightFox’s team will find you airfare that is usually at least 20 percent cheaper (often even cheaper than that) than you’ll find anywhere else. When flying internationally, especially on routes serviced by legacy carriers rather than the discount airlines, FlightFox is absolutely worth the service charge.